Open Source Solaris?

As reported by News.com: Sun will release Solaris 10 under an open source license by the end of the year. Sun evidently wants to create a project around Solaris similar to the Fedora effort. There are numerous ways of viewing this announcement; in the absence of much in the way of real details, one might as well succumb to the temptation to apply a significant amount of imagination.

From a cynical viewpoint, one can argue that Sun is just acting from commercial desperation. By putting Solaris out there, the company hopes to attract attention, divert some developer and user interest from Linux, and, with luck, dump some of its development and maintenance load onto the community. Such a move would seem destined to failure; Sun's ability to "get" free software has been mixed at best in recent years, and the company is in no position to take a leadership position there now.

The paranoid among us wait, with trepidation, for Sun to specify a license for the code it is releasing. At best, they fear, Solaris will be managed like Java; source will be available, but the code will be managed with an iron hand and there will be no opportunity for a true community to come together around Solaris. In a worst-case scenario, the Solaris license will not only forbid any sort of cross-pollination with the truly free operating systems, but it will also "taint" any developer who looks at the Solaris code. A license which attempts to forbid the transfer of code, algorithms, techniques, etc. outside of Solaris could be fodder for the next round of unpleasant lawsuits. Remember that Solaris is based on SCO-owned code, Sun obtained options on SCO stock last year, and Sun dumped several million dollars into the SCO Group for "licensing fees" as well. The relationship between these two companies never has been explained in a satisfactory way.

The optimistic observer, instead, will hope that Solaris goes out with a GPL-compatible license. At that point, Solaris becomes another free Unix system, alongside the various BSD projects. Useful code in Solaris can be incorporated into other systems, and Solaris, too, can benefit from code and ideas found in the other free systems. Solaris users will know that their operating system can remain viable well into the future, regardless of what happens to Sun. And the free software community will be that much richer.

The gray-bearded True Unix People would still rather have the source for SunOS 4 (or even SunOS 3) and to heck with Solaris.

Until Sun tells us exactly what it plans to do, with an emphasis on which code will be released and under which license, it is hard to say with any certainty what the Solaris release will mean. Things could go in almost any direction. We're most curious to see what Sun comes up with; hopefully they will not make us wait too long before filling in the details.

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